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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2025
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Well I’ll be damned. I had just recently made a comment about how open source printers have been hard to make due to all of the challenges associated with aligning the paper. This is an absolutely genius solution to the problem! Gonna have to plan on getting one of these.
Tons of 2d printer challenges.
The ink jet head at a resolution of <50um (as opposed to 3d printing resolution of usually >200um)
Combined with printing on many different surfaces and such: cardstock, printing paper, glossy, weights, stickers, etc...
This project "cheated" (I mean that not in a negative way, tons of open source hardware projects use proprietary components, my own does too for now) by using a proprietary ready-mades printhead, which saves the most cost and effort of the whole machine, and is the component that causes the most issues, generally.
I definitely want to try this out too.
Can you elaborate on the paper alignment challenge? Why is it difficult to do and why this roll solve the problem?
Getting the printer to pick up a single sheet off a stack of .003” thick sheets at a variable depth, and then dealing with variable sized-sheets, rotation, paper jam detection to avoid burning out motors, just to name a few. Things get even more complicated with things like 2-sided printing.
If it was just one of these at once, it might be pretty approachable, but the classic and convenient 8 1/2 X 11” paper tray that modern printers have is a genuine challenge to manage without lots of careful communication with all the different parts.
It can sometimes be hard to pick out a single sheet even by hand.
Having to do that with something having a much lower sensitivity definitely has quite a few challenges.